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Background/aim: Practical difficulties, particularly long model development time, have limited the types and applicability of computational fluid dynamics simulations in numerical modeling of blood flow in serial manner. In these simulations, the most revealing flow parameters are the endothelial shear stress distribution and oscillatory shear index. The aim of this study was analyze their role in the diagnosis of the occurrence and prognosis of plaque development in coronary artery bifurcations., Methods: We developed a novel modeling technique for rapid cardiovascular hemodynamic simulations taking into account interactions between fluid domain (blood) and solid domain (artery wall). Two numerical models that represent the observed subdomains of an arbitrary patient-specific coronary artery bifurcation were created using multi-slice computed tomography (MSCT) coronagraphy and ultrasound measurements of blood velocity. Coronary flow using an in-house finite element solver PAK-FS was solved., Results: Overall behavior of coronary artery bifurcation during one cardiac cycle is described by: velocity, pressure, endothelial shear stress, oscillatory shear index, stress in arterial wall and nodal displacements. The places where (a) endothelial shear stress is less than 1.5, and (b) oscillatory shear index is very small (close or equal to 0) are prone to plaque genesis., Conclusion: Finite element simulation of fluid-structure interaction was used to investigate patient-specific flow dynamics and wall mechanics at coronary artery bifurcations. Simulation model revealed that lateral walls of the main branch and lateral walls distal to the carina are exposed to low endothelial shear stress which is a predilection site for development of atherosclerosis. This conclusion is confirmed by the low values of oscillatory shear index in those places.

In this retrospective pilot study we tried to find out whether there were any differences in therapeutic response to electroconvulsive therapy in the patients with diagnosed unipolar affective disorder due to the presence and type of delusions in the clinical course of the disease. The sample consists of 45 inpatient unipolar depressives, 15 male and 30 female, divided into 3 experimental groups: nondelusional depressions, depressions with congruent delusions and depressions with incongruent delusions. Two variables were used to estimate the therapeutic response: number of received ECT treatments and proportion of full remissions. Our results showed significant differences between all the groups for both variables with the best therapeutic response in the group of incongruent delusional depressions and the worst in the group of nondelusional depressions.